Orbiting Climate Observatory 3 (OCO-3) Command Access Request (CAR) System

About this technology

Overview

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3 (OCO-3) is a space instrument that will investigate important questions about the distribution of carbon dioxide on Earth as it relates to growing urban populations and changing patterns of fossil fuel combustion. OCO-3 explores, for the first time, daily variations in the release and uptake of carbon dioxide by plants and trees in the major tropical rain forests of South America, Africa, and South-East Asia, the largest stores of above ground carbon on our planet. Measuring the daily variations in these major carbon systems addresses an important missing component in our knowledge and is crucial for explaining global variations in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. NASA developed and assembled the instrument using spare materials from OCO-2. The OCO-3 CAR tool collects information about OCO-3's potential targets for a given time period. It then generates a report used in a mission planning tool (CLASP). After observations have occurred, the CAR system keeps track of actual observations and discards information about ones that did not take place. The science team also updates information about how successful individual observations were, which feeds back into the report generated for CLASP.